For Mark Zuckerberg, The Future is Immersive

In a conference call today to discuss the company’s latest earnings, Facebook cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined the current state of the company along with COO Sheryl Sandberg and CFO David Wehner. While they emphasized video’s growing role on Facebook, and how video sharing is up in News Feed, Zuckerberg is already looking to the future. And that future includes virtual reality.

“There’s this continued progression of people getting richer and richer ways to share what’s on their mind,” Zuckerberg says. “So if you go back ten years, most of how people communicated was through text. We’re going through a period where now it’s mostly visual and photos. We’re entering into a period where that’s increasingly going to be video—and we’re seeing huge growth there. But that’s not the end of the line.”

“There’s always a richer way that people want to share and consume thoughts and ideas,” he added. “And I think immersive 3D content is the obvious next thing after video.” Facebook acquired the virtual reality startup Oculus last year, and its product, the Oculus Rift, is expected to go on sale beginning early next year.

For now though, video remains central on News Feed for both users, who spend around 46 minutes a day on the company’s products (not including WhatsApp), and advertisers, who like to reach users with targeted videos. “Our video demand is very deep,” Sandberg says. “People love video.” And while those clips may keep people sticking around now—one day, they may be sharing VR.

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Mark Zuckerberg Has Secured Control of Facebook for Years to Come

At Facebook’s annual shareholder meeting this morning, one investor had an unusual question for CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“One of the downsides of being successful and rich is you create some resentment from people,” he said. “How do you make yourself warm and fuzzy and loved throughout the world?”

That might seem like a random question from an eccentric. But how the world views Zuckerberg—and how Zuckerberg views the world—matters more than ever for Facebook. That’s because for possibly decades to come, Facebook’s future is Mark Zuckerberg.

At the meeting, Facebook shareholders voted to approve a restructuring of the company’s stock offering that ensures Zuckerberg keeps his majority ownership even if the company issues more stock. That means for the foreseeable future, Zuckerberg is in control.

Responding to the shareholder’s question, Zuckerberg said in order to keep people interested in Facebook, you have to be clear about what you’re trying to do. “If you say clearly what you care about and how you’re going to make decisions and what you’re going to invest in, then people who want to be a part of that opt in and choose to be part of that,” Zuckerberg said. “And people who don’t like it choose not to.”

Not Going Anywhere

So far, more than 1.65 billion people are opting in every month, which gives shareholders little reason to want anyone else in charge. More than 1 billion people look at Facebook on mobile devices every day, and the company brought in more than $5 billion in revenue just last quarter. In other words, Zuckerberg is not exactly pushing people away.

Thanks to its ability not just to attract a massive audience but to get them to reveal so much about themselves, Facebook has been able to give its customers—that is, advertisers—options that keep them coming back and spending their money. Facebook can insert highly targeted mobile ads into its News Feed. It has aggressively ramped up video, which opens the platform to lucrative video ads. On Instagram, it offers visual ads that make Google’s AdWords look like just so many words. “For the very long run, I believe our monetization will be primarily advertising,” said Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg’s chief counterpart at the top of Facebook’s corporate hierarchy.

But Zuckerberg appears to know that remaining the undisputed king of mobile means coming up with new things to offer, which is why he’s committed so heavily to messaging in the form of both WhatsApp and Messenger. “It’s not that they compete for mindshare against each other,” Zuckerberg said of the potential for competition between the two. “They represent different philosophies and utilities.” WhatsApp is “more utilitarian,” a tool focused on speed, Zuckerberg said, while he described Messenger as a tool for expression.

Still, Zuckerberg plans to extend messaging on both to become not just a way you communicate with your friends but also businesses. Facebook already has 50 million business pages today. Next he wants people to use Messenger and WhatsApp to get those businesses talking with their customers. “People don’t want to be on the phone for customer support for half an hour at a time,” Zuckerberg said. “If they can just send a message and send a response back, then that’s a good experience.”

All in all, Zuckerberg has built a platform that people want to use, and advertisers want to pay to reach them. And he’s extending that platform to include virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and “connectivity,” or Facebook’s catchall term for the drones, lasers, and free Internet it’s trying to deploy around the world to make sure as many people as possible can get online. “Every 10 or 15 years, big new computing platforms come along, whether that was desktop or web or mobile phones,” he said. “We want to make sure that the next big computing platform is fundamentally social.” Ultimately, Facebook’s biggest investment is building a platform on top of you. And today Facebook shareholders made sure Zuckerberg will be around for a long time to come to lead the way.

Facebook Shuts Down Its ‘Creative Labs’ for App Experiments

As reported by CNET, the company has removed the public web page dedicated to Creative Labs, and it has removed three of its standalone apps from the Apple App Store: Slingshot, an ephemeral messaging service that mimicked the popular Snapchat app; Riff, a group video-making app similar to a Snapchat tool called Our Story; and Rooms, a way of chatting semi-anonymously that seemed to answer apps like Whisper, Secret, and YikYak.

But in shutting down Creative Labs, Facebook isn’t shutting down much more than a trio of copycat smartphones apps. As Facebook product manager Michael Reckhow told us after Creative Labs first launched early last year, this was wasn’t a physical lab or even a team of people. It was more of a call to arms inside the company—a stated effort to promote self-contained projects that could push Facebook in new directions.

“Creative Labs is not a place or a building or a team,” Reckhow said. “It’s an identifier that we place on a project that says: ‘This is something that is going to be separate, that we’re going to give room to grow.'”

The first of these projects was Paper, a kind of standalone Facebook News Feed overseen by Reckhow and dreamed up by a team of designers and engineers with roots at Apple and a startup called Push Pop Press, which had been acquired by Facebook. Paper never captured a large audience. But unlike Slingshot and Riff and Rooms, it remains in the App Store. And it directly inspired a core Facebook service called Instant Articles, which allows publishers to publish news articles straight to Facebook in a format that will load unusually quickly in users’ News Feeds.

So, in that sense, Creative Labs worked as it was designed to. A company spokesperson says that aspects of Slingshot and Riff and Rooms were also incorporated into the main Facebook app. It’s unclear why the company has shut down the Creative Labs homepage, but in doing so, it’s really just shutting down, well, a name. Facebok will continue to experiment with new apps. Standalone apps like Groups, Mentions, and Moments remain—as does Paper. It was far more experimental than apps like Slingshot, Riff, and Rooms. In fact, that weren’t that experimental at all. They won’t be missed. And the attitude behind Creative Labs isn’t going anywhere.

Facebook Is Going to Start Giving Video Makers A Cut

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said today that his company’s platform is notching 8 billion video views daily, doubling the number it reported in April. More than 500 million users are watching those videos, he said.

“Over the next few years video is going to be the most engaging content online, and by continuing to innovate here we have a chance to build the best place to watch and share video,” Zuckerberg said.

For Facebook, video has become central. The company has made it possible for public figures to broadcast live, and for creators to upload interactive 360-degree videos to the platform.

The company has also said that it’s testing a dedicated place on Facebook to watch videos, which reminds us a whole lot of the biggest place on the Internet to watch video also known as YouTube.

While Facebook’s video numbers continue to grow, some critics, such as well-known YouTube creator Hank Green, have questioned Facebook’s standard for counting video views (a view is any video seen for 3 seconds or more). YouTube, for its part, counts a “view” as someone watching a video for 30 seconds or more.

For Facebook, it doesn’t seem to matter all that much. People are watching videos and the company seems intent on getting the best videos it can on the service, even if it may have to pay.

“There’s a certain class of content which is only going to come onto Facebook if there’s a good way to compensate content owners for that,” Zuckerberg said when asked how to keep media partners happy. “We’ve recently rolled out the business model for this. We’ll give a revenue share on a portion of the views to content owners.”

Facebook Says 1 in 7 Humans Checks Facebook Every Day

Everyone doesn’t use Facebook. But it’s starting to feel like some day they might.

There are a little more than 7 billion people in the world, and-more than 1 billion of them are now checking Facebook every day, the company said when reporting its third-quarter earnings today. In other words, about 1 out of every 7 human beings checks into Facebook each day.

“Mobile continues to drive our growth,” Facebook’s chief financial officer David Wehner said today during the call with investors. Nearly 1.4 billion users check in to Facebook on their mobile phones each month, including 1 billion users on Android phones, the company said.

That’s crucial as mobile advertising becomes increasingly important to Facebook’s business. The company said that in the past quarter mobile advertising accounted for more than three quarters of its advertising revenue.

So, yeah, those numbers are huge. But Facebook isn’t just thriving with its flagship service: it is also seeing a sizable audience flock to the other social apps it owns. Instagram now sees 400 million users, Messenger has 700 million, and Whats App has 900 million. Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said today, “The amount people want to share and create is boundless.”

“You can’t have a mission to want to connect everyone in the world and leave out the biggest country,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a call today after the company reported its third-quarter earnings. “Over the long term that is a situation that we will need to try to figure out a way forward on.”

But Zuckerberg also said Facebook is in China in ways that we might not think about. “For now, the thing that I would leave you with—people think Facebook isn’t in China at all, and that’s actually not true. Our consumer service isn’t active there, but it actually is already one of the biggest advertising markets that we have,” he said.

“Because there are a lot of really big and important Chinese companies who sell a lot of products to people outside of China—and they use Facebook as one of their primary tools in a lot of cases to spread information about what they’re doing and grow their customer base,” he said.

Zuckerberg did not elaborate on the kinds of Chinese companies that have advertised on Facebook. But it’s revealing that in even the places that Facebook’s consumer products don’t have a presence, the company still has its eyes set on how it can expand. After all, Facebook’s business is built on ads. The only question is when Facebook will finally be available to users in China, too.

Facebook Just Keeps Raking It in on Mobile

Three years ago, Facebook didn’t really have a mobile business. Now, mobile is its core business.

Facebook released its second quarter earnings report this afternoon, revealing revenues of more than $4 billion, and that mobile advertising represented about 76 percent of that revenue. That’s up from 62 percent during the same quarter last year.

In June 2015, on mobile devices, the company says, it saw 968 million daily average users across all devices, with 844 million checking in daily on mobile, year-over-year increases of 17 and 29 percent respectively. That number grows considerably with monthly average users. Facebook says it sees 1.49 billion users over all as of June, with 1.31 billion checked-in on mobile. That’s also an uptick from last year.

This enormous user base is what drives so much of the company’s ad revenues. And the main story is that so much growth continues to come on mobile. Other companies continue to struggle on smartphones and tablets, which are clearly the future of computing, but Facebook very much has figured it out.

Notably, Facebook also said that its total costs and expenses in the second quarter reached $2.7 billion, an 82 percent increase over last year. Much of that is likely money spent on the data centers that underpin the company’s social network. But, when you’re winning, like Facebook, spending money on expansion is a very good idea.